"Henrietta Horne" wrote in message
...
I need check a list of words against an alphabet (a string of letters)
and return the index of the letter in the word that is the highest in
the alphabet.

For example, for the alphabet is "etaoin", these words would return
these indices:

Word Index
to 4
ate 3
ten 6
neat 6
tee 2

Is there some magic Excel function that will do this?

If not, can someone post the guts of a search loop to select each
letter in sWord and find the index in sAlphabet?

The actual alphabet will have all 26 letters and might look like this:

etaoinsrhldcumgfpwybvkjxzq



Untested "air code"

Function GetIndex(sWord As String, sAlphabet As String) _
As Integer

Dim sChar As String
Dim iIndex As Integer
Dim iLoop As Integer
Dim iTemp As Integer

For iLoop = 1 To Len(sWord)
sChar = Mid(sWord, iLoop)
iTemp = InStr(sChar, sAlphabet, vbTextCompare)
If iTemp iIndex Then
iIndex = iTemp
End If
Next iLoop

GetIndex = iIndex

End Function

HTH!

--
Clif McIrvin

(clare reads his mail with moe, nomail feeds the bit bucket :-)